Kathrein Tackles In-Building Coverage

ROSENHEIM, Germany -- Kathrein has announced an innovative solution to meet the growing demand for mobile data traffic in buildings and across campus-wide environments. The German-based antenna and electronics manufacturer has developed a new Micro C-RAN (Centralised - Radio Access Network) system called K-BOW that will be launched at this month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (Hall 06, Stand J36).

Kathrein's K-BOW system bridges the gap between established network architectures and those required to deliver future wireless service provision indoors and over mixed indoor/outdoor sites. K-BOW supports multi-operator, multi-band and multi-standard operation and uses the flexibility of a mobile communications capacity pool to dynamically meet changing demand for data. In this way, operators have the flexibility to adjust their in-building networks to meet customer requirements and react quickly to changes in user behaviour.

As changes to coverage and capacity can be done remotely and do not involve physical changes to the installation, Kathrein's Micro C-RAN solution drastically reduces the cost and time for network operators. This contrasts to conventional static indoor cell architectures, which are very expensive to modify or upgrade.

K-BOW aggregates data traffic with a centralised RAN platform and transmits multiple combinations of signals to individual radio units (RUs). The solution is remotely-controlled over a network monitoring system so that capacity in any area within the building can be easily increased or decreased. This allows for the creation of self-organising networks (SONs) in buildings, while LTE MIMO can also be directly introduced to offer end user data rates equivalent to those outside of buildings.

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